Move to Activism

As vegans (who are also animal activists) we’ve made it our business to look, and what we’ve seen has turned us vegan. And by going vegan, by protesting, we are hoping to carry with us a large proportion of our community on a wave of fashion - being green and being ‘vegg’. With a substantial alteration of attitude our society and our businesses could so easily swap over to keep in step with the new demand.
What will drive this> Will it be a great surge of compassion? Is this an awakening to healthy food? Or is it just a new fashion taking hold amongst a gentler generation? The upset and consequent root and branch change in our own attitudes may come from indignation that we’ve been eating food from such places and kept in the dark about it. As the fashion gets stronger the question we’ll be asking of parents, politicians and teachers is “Why didn’t you tell us?”. All of this, the new energy foods, the cruelty-free foods, new awareness – it’s a springboard for us, personally, helping us to move over to a more vegan consciousness … and then thundering back to reality we ask ourselves a question – “in practical terms do I have the will power to make a permanent change?”
As we move into adulthood or at least into a state of independence where we’re cooking/ preparing our own meals, we have to focus on the job in hand. New food, new approach. We have to move on from blaming those who didn’t tell us. Who to blame anyway? Just about every one of us has blood on our hands. We can even blame ourselves more than anyone else, for perpetuating our own mistakes even when we knew we were making mistakes. Drop the blame. It’s what we do that counts and the way we get there – if we LOOK at how pigs are forced to live … then we drop pork, if we see how the battery system operates… then we stop using eggs. See an abattoir … stop using anything that has a face.
[That look! If you’ve seen a cow in the chute at the abattoir, as she is led into the execution chamber, her face is unforgettable – an animal looking at you as they are approaching their own violent death. Their pre-death groans are quite the most heartbreaking sounds you’ve ever heard. Enough to stop us in our tracks, check habits, boycott and fume silently.]

For a while this is a huge enough project in itself, but later, when the food issues have been resolved and shoes and clothes have been sorted out then, as a practising vegan, we can take time to compare all the sadness of what we’ve seen and the attitude that has crept up on us unnoticed, and consider ourselves lucky we’ve made it through. Vegan consciousness gives us self confidence and that allows us to be grateful for the chance we’ve been given, to advocate for the animals. What is really sad is when we start to make comparisons between ourselves and others, and lose faith in human nature, because of what we see in a few people around us. We need to develop an optimistic faith in the regeneration of humans. That mustn’t be lost, despite everything we see. The human capacity for transformation is our only hope for change. We have to believe in that capacity despite all that we don’t like about human behaviour.